Fontainebleau, the Loire and the Valois (part IV)

In it
there already awakens the need for an architectural system; it comes with
force, but a force surrounded by that proud grace and by that sense of a nature
made aristocratic with which the artists of that time delighted the feudal
lords who had lost the coarseness of former times. The architectural system
needed is one which shall tend to anticipate that agreement with the commands
of the monarchical dogma, an agreement which is to be realized a century later.
In Paris, Catherine reigns and Diane Is forgotten. The architect restrains his
fantasy and concentrates it upon erecting, in the center of the city, the house
symbolic of the autocracy. He is no longer in the heart of the woods, he has no
longer to build the great hunting castle where the king, amid the gallantry of
his court, comes to rest from war by hunting the stag and the boar, where he
and the beautiful women about him direct the course of religion and diplomacy.
The architect no longer follows Francis I, going from the verdant parks of the
Loire, where the abundance of tranquil waters soothes the fatigue of his flesh,
to the deep forests of the Ile de France, where his gross, carnal sensuality
appeases itself in bloodshed. In these animated solitudes, if the architect had
lost the sense of the need of the people which makes great architecture, the
painter and the sculptor felt the rise in themselves of creative elements, the
power of which only the pagan world had known. When one wanders the lengths of
the mysterious avenues which stretch away beneath the sunny trees; when one
listens to the sound of hunters' horns, to the calls, the gallops, and the
flights under the branches growing faint in the distance; when, under the shade
of an oak, one reads the poems of Ronsard, scented with boxwood and with
laurel—it seems as if furtive apparitions of bare breasts and haunches were
animating the bed of the peaceful waters where sail the black and white swans.
Primaticcio, after Rosso, had brought from Mantua, to decorate Fontainebleau,
the enormous and abundant knowledge of his master, Giulio Romano, who had been
trained in the Farnesine and in whom the admirable grace of Raphael was
stifling under the bestial sensuality that had been loosed, and under which the
Italy of the sixteenth century suddenly foundered, after the prophets of the
Sistine had made their voices heard. Both artists had met the nymphs of the
French forests. Rosso, in order to recover them, disrobed the royal favorites
who, like them, wore a crescent in their blond hair. Primaticcio carried them
in disorder into the great waxed and gilded halls, audaciously extended their
long, wavelike forms amid the golden frames of the mirrors, and set great
herculean bodies beside the monumental fireplaces and the windows; with the
flowering breasts, the full haunches, and the moving hips of the nymphs he
grouped fruits, wheat, grapes, and vegetables which were brought from the
fields and the trellises for the table of the king. A worldly Olympus installed
itself at the edge of the motionless pools which at times, in the evenings,
when the hunter's call resounded, were purpled by torches and by blood.

It is
into this atmosphere, drunk with sensuality and with the open air, that all the
artists were to enter, when once the increasing glory of the monarchy had swept
them into its orbit. Among all of them, one feels Ronsard again, the odor of
the woods, the breath that issues from cool caves, a murmur of running waters,
and the nude women in whom the poet of the gardens saw beautiful columns
entwined with grape vine and ivy. It is as exiles from their true century that
these artists appear, apart from the multitude, apart from its needs, its
sufferings, and the spirit that stirred it. Nowhere do we find Montaigne, save
at times with the Clouets. Nowhere do we find Rabelais save in the valiant and
savory humor of the good sculptor, Pierre Bontems. There is no echo of the
horrible religious wars, no odor of the fagots that burn flesh and books. The
Protestant artists themselves have not all felt the passing of Calvin. Perhaps
even so, is there not a little of his stark nature in the tombs of Barthélémy
Prieur? And doubtless it is his dry vigor and his anguish that Ligier Richier
is bringing back when he sets up on a pedestal a decomposing corpse offering
its heart to heaven or when he assembles around the dead Christ a harsh and
thin group of weeping women and of the men who bear the body. But Jean Goujon,
the greatest of them all, has not set foot in the country. He is a Huguenot,
but more pure and more gentle than austere; he wanders from the Loire to
Fontainebleau, never averting his eyes from the wheatfields and the waters that
are silvered by the breath of the wind.

There
is nothing more French among us than this man who yet has nothing of our easy
good nature nor our bantering common sense, who owes to the Italians his
education as an artist, and who is Hke a bond of union between France exiled in
Italy with Giovanni da Bologna and Italy exiled in France with Primaticcio and
Rosso. He is of that lyricism of France which very rarely appears alone, but
whose flame arises as soon as Latin or Germanic lyricism has passed through the
air near it. He is the impalpable idea which, from one end of this soil to the
other, bends the harvests and the grasses with the wind. Whatever the material
he works in, bronze or marble, statue or medallion, bas-relief or full round,
he brings into sculpture, not the processes
of painting as do the sculptors of the inferior periods, but a spirit which is
not of painting, not even of music, that invisible fluid which passes with the
winds, the perfumes, and the sonorous murmurs, through the air, the silence,
and the waters; into his work he carries the whole of that diffused substance
which floats restlessly in arrested forms—and even when the form stands alone
and when around it there is neither air, nor silence, nor waters.

Have
you seen how one of Jean Goujon's faces smiles over a bare shoulder, how a
young breast blooms in the angle made by a bending arm? Have you seen the wave
that runs through these limbs, these hard, arched feet, the high calves of the
legs, the long thighs, all the slender roundnesses that hide muscles of iron,
the great forms that are made for leaping in the forest in pursuit of the deer
or to flee "like a trembling faun" when the royal huntsman crosses
its path? From them comes forth an odor of watery moss, a breath of the damp
forest. Those beautiful, pure arms which flow from the shoulders are a liquid
column issuing from an urn; those torsos turn upon the haunches with the fluidity
of the tides that meet and mingle before surrendering themselves to the same
current; those draperies stirred by the breeze form lines like those on the
surface of the water; there is a sound of springs and of fountains, of the lazy
undulation of the willows, of the murmur of the poplars; one sees the long
curves of the rivers of France and the silver gleam they make among the reeds
and the water plants.

Truly,
from Rosso and from Primaticcio to Jean Goujon, and especially with Goujon,
there was in this art of the glades, of the ponds, and of the forests, this art
of statues and of columns half seen behind a wall of branches, a most admirable
sentiment of the feminine body amid nature. This sentiment was to decline very
quickly in the measure that monarchical absolutism increased, but it could not
fail to assert itself with the passionate vigor of a springtime both on the
morrow of the nameless sufferings lived through by the people of France, and in
the hope of a resurrection held out to the people by the young and
beauty-loving royal family that fled from the devastated cities to take
possession of itself. The art of an aristocracy, the art of a caste even, but
superior to its function because it sprang like a young shoot from an old tree
and because, in a language different from that spoken by the men who lived in
the fever of the time—Rabelais, d'Aubigné, the reformers, the printers,
the booksellers, and the inventors—it affirmed the invincible vitality of a
race that had been crushed to earth by more than a hundred years of sorrow and
misery. If the violent fervency of belief in the future, the characteristic of
this century, is not felt in the work of Jean Goujon, he, more than any of the
others, possesses its humanity, its profound and sacred tenderness for
everything that represents the forces of to-morrow. Have we sufficiently noted
that these poets of woman were also the poets of childhood? Have we
sufficiently noted that the Gothic men, in the strength and in the hardihood of
their life, had felt but little of the glory of the child which sprang from the
mother's womb as a manifestation of their vigor, too facile and too frequent
for them to think of representing it? Have we sufficiently noted that their
love goes out to the woman as a mother, that it is the hips, one higher than
the other, and her arm wearied by the weight that it carries, which aroused
their tenderness lather than the child itself, which is almost always
inexpressive and commonplace as it rests upon that arm?

The
Italians alone, from the time of their old masters, from Giovanni Pisano,
Jacopo della Quercia, and especially Donatello and the della Robbias, had bent
attentively over childhood. The idealistic peoples are too much attached to the
beauty perceived through the senses not to desire it wherever it is to be
found; they are so thoroughly concerned with the future that they cannot fail
to perceive it in the being who bears its secret within him. Is it their
influence or is it rather the awakening of French individualism, the desire for
general investigation, which seizes upon the western world in the sixteenth
century? But Jean Goujon suddenly perceives the beauty of childhood, of
childhood delicate and plump; and Germain Pilon, the learned sculptor, who
seems scarcely to think of anything except how he may prove that he knows his
trade of cutting in stone the faithful portraits of his kings or of setting up
around funeral urns or extending upon tombs his beautiful forms, bare and full,
feels the mystery of a childish face with a great swelling curve of the
forehead, the exaggerated smallness of the nose, the exaggerated protrusion of
the lips and cheeks, the delicious hesitation that makes all the features so
unprecise; and Ligier Richier himself flees from his visions of hell and death
as soon as there is a chance to model a skull as round as a ball and the fat,
trembling mass, divine and fragile, of the flesh of a child swelling with blood
and with milk. And thus we catch a glimpse of one of the faces of this time
when the hope in the life of the world was sprouting amid the bruised flesh and
the deadly vapors.

The end
of the Italian wars, the end of the civil wars, and the definitive triumph of
the monarchy which had been active and fighting constantly despite its moral
decomposition and its luxury, were to take away the especial accent of French
art which had been revived by Roman influence and by contact with the woods and
the rivers. The king installs himself in the Louvre of Pierre Lescot and of
Chambiges. The artist who follows him thither reads Malherbe instead of
Ronsard; the streets of Paris and the words of Rabelais seem very coarse to him
after having seen the palaces of Rome and of Venice, the Sistine of Michael
Angelo, and the Stanze of Raphael.
The fall will be as rapid as the rise was vigorous, and the artists who will
mark the passage from the free invasion of Italian genius to the imposing
dogmatism of the century of Louis XIV may rather be called witnesses of that
passage than factors in it. Bernard Palissy and Jean Cousin are merely workmen
in art. That which impresses us with the first man is that he has that human
faith which made his century so powerful in western Europe. The second—painter,
sculptor, glass maker, and geometrician—is scarcely more than the caricature of
the universalist Italians, which the time demanded. Fréminet,
the official artist, is a Michael Angelo of the mountebank's stage—his work is
riddled with holes, covered with bumps, and full of wind. The soul of the
people is mute. A terrible silence reigns over the work of the wearisome
chatterers, of literature and painting who, during a third of a century, will
mumble the law under the shadow of the throne.

No
matter. All that was to be. The Italian Renaissance could not fail to react
strongly upon us. Isolation kills. Peoples, like men, cannot live within
themselves eternally. They have to penetrate one another in order to seek
resources which their contacts with unknown imaginations and sensibilities will
reveal. After these encounters there is almost always a partial receding, but a
profound work is going on, an invisible march toward further realizations which
will be the more vast and complex the greater the number of elements which have
come to take part in them. Whether we will it or not, we must, in our battle
for the ideas of the future, rely on the spirit that Renaissance Italy brought
into us quite as much as on the popular strength which, in the Middle Ages,
brought forth a thousand naves and two thousand towers.